Thursday, 6 May, 2010 | 2:48 pm | 50 comments
How to lose 5000 new natural inlinks… per month! (Dagbladet.no story)
Yep, you heard right – this is a story about how a major newspaper in Norway over a night lost 5 000 incoming, natural links… per month.
What is Twingly and what has it to do with links?
To get all of these things right we have to explain some things about Twingly and why it’s one of the best tools to have on a news site to attract links from blogs. Twingly have a lot of products but the most interesting I’m going to talk about here is their blog widget that you can add to any site/page.
Here’s an example on how it looks on SvD.se in Sweden:
And here’s an example on how it looks on the newspaper Telegraaf.nl:
The funcionality is quite simple – with Twingly you can show every blog that links to the given page/article with title and description. With this you add value to the visitors who reads an article about a current topic and can then see interesting blog post about it. Twingly also have good spam-detection so news papers don’t have do moderate everything.
The bloggers gain from this from the easy perspective that they gain traffic from the given posts and thus can benefit from this. It’s also some form of ego boost for the bloggers.
Bloggers and the faithfulness of linking, Twingly = Link Love!
If you have Twingly on your site and your competitors don’t have it you have an advantage, because where do you think that the bloggers will link? To the article about Princess Madeleine that doesn’t give you credit for linking or the article that gives you credit?
Of course – if you’re a blogger your blog posts links will go to the newspapers with Twingly. This is exactly what’s happened in Europe and especially Scandinavia where a lot of sites have the Twingly Blog Widgets.
How Dagbladet.no lost 5000 natural inlinks!
In Norway the major newspapers had Twingly installed on their sites and enjoyed a lot of incoming links, but one day some stupid person decided that they didn’t want Twingly on their site. The result?
Above you see VG.no and Dagbladet.no compared when it comes to number of incoming links from blogs. As you can see in October 2009 Daglbadet.no had a huge drop when it comes to incoming links but VG.no stayed the same and actually had a increase if you compare January/February 2009 with January/February 2010.
If you look closer at this graph you’ll see a drop of over 5 000 new natural inlinks per month! Here you see the true value of adding incentives to bloggers.
If you scratch their backs you will get a lot of links, if you don’t – they will link to your competitor.
The first thing here is that Dagbladet.no now looses a lot of blog traffic but this is not the most important thing because the traffic from blogs is not enourmous compared to the traffic a newspaper can gain from good rankings on search engines.
What do you think that Google will think of your site if you suddenly have approximately 5 000 fewer incoming links per month?
So to summarize this Dagbladet.no has managed to do the following things:
- Impacted their relationship with bloggers
- Lost traffic from bloggers that won’t link anymore
- Making it harder to rank on current topics because of fewer incoming links
- Worsen their total SEO job due to the fact of lesser incoming links
Great job Dagbladet.no – you screwed up big time!
P.S. f I were VG.no I would order some Twingly-cake and cheer 
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